A History of Esports - Page 7

On April 03 2012 20:13 r.Evo wrote:Urgs. While I absolutely love the project, the details, everything, I have one huge problem with it:

It's not something you can show to people who aren't already interested. Mostly due to the fact that it has no video footage or anything. I saw the thread, skimmed through it, was like "omgomgomgomg must show gf/random parents/people", clicked the youtube link and was like "QQ fuck no way anyone besides me would sit through an hour of listening". =/

Any way to help you with some kind of video that shows what the hell you're talking about?

i'm thinking about how to make these into videos but i'm not totally sure how to handle the rights involved. ill figure something out.

The Chobopeon Show, Episode 3: A History of Esports Part 3, Quake and the rise of the RTS

+Quake (1996)

The next major game from id Software was 1996’s Quake.

Competitive Quake is at first glance deathly simple much like its predecessors. Two opponents are in a small arena littered with a dozen weapons, a few types of armor and all the possibilities in the world. There’s nothing to do but kill the other man and, in ten minutes, the highest kill count wins.

The duel begins with a booming voice commanding you to ‘Fight!’. Next, the simplicity slams into you at 100 miles per hour. Immediately, a powerful weapon is sitting in front of the competitors and they sprint to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhzXKMqZBBc

The entire atmosphere in Quake is frantic from the colors to the music to, of course, the speed. Every step, even at a mind-numbing sprint, will resonate through the game. Players work to achieve ideal positioning as they fight a tactical and strategic battle, all the while shooting for perfect aim through the fire and lightning raining down upon them.

Quake takes a minute to learn and an instant to enjoy watching. It is deceptively deep. Each weapon requires different tactics. Each arena allows for a multitude of styles and each player is allowed creative freedom.

The physical side of the game complements the manic mind game. The game is an endless pursuit of perfection in aiming the weapons of Quake’s arsenal. The two sides of the game, the mental and physical intertwine unpredictably. They form one of the most enduring esports in the world.

Quake would launch a franchise that is not only still fiercely loved but also played religiously by a loyal group of gamers in competitions even in 2012.

Quake is a title that was famously difficult for id Software to create, complete with several delays and an increasingly hostile work environment. After sustained conflict with head programmer John Carmack, John Romero was fired shortly after the game’s 1996 release.

The list of real-life Quake casualties is notorious.

The list of virtual Quake casualties is endless. Every day, hundreds of thousands would play the new game with up to 16 competitors to a single server, up from 4 per server for Doom.

The game received towering reviews noting the stunning combat gameplay and the monumental technical achievement the game represented. For all of the love showered on id’s knack for single player experience, Quake’s multiplayer experience was revered head and shoulders above all else.

“In 1996 there wasn’t much of an internet,” Level designer Tom Willits told 1up.com. “Doom was a peer-to-peer system and a pain in the ass. Quake was the first true PC server/client architecture system. People told us we were crazy. They said, why would anyone run a Quake server on their machine to allow people they don’t know to play a game?”

Immediately, the already substantial online gaming community gave birth to the competitive community. News sites spawned quickly, teams and clans were formed, matches were organized, wins and losses were doled out as competitors played tirelessly into the dawn of modern esports.

Although entering a server was initially a tedious manual task, Quake eventually gave rise to server browsers in the form of QuakeSpy that would eventually become GameSpy.

The term cyberathlete was coined around this time.

Thresh was sponsored by Microsoft in 1996. Ambitious minds and active imaginations spawned grandiose ideas of a cybersports Super Bowl.

The first QuakeCon took place in August 1996. In a Best Western in Garland, Texas, a group of young men filled up the hotel’s ballroom with massive gaming machines. Ready to play at the highest level they could, the group decided to invite the famous creators of the game to a deathmatch.

They wrote the challenge on a loose piece of paper and a dozen guys signed their names. They drove to the id Software offices with what read like a declaration of war.

“The ops of #quake cordially invite the guys at id to a MAN BEATING,” read the note, according to Dungeons and Dreamers.The #quake community from IRC organized what became the first QuakeCon and reached out to id to raise the event to the next level. Carmack and company made the trip to the event. The online community first heard the specifics of id’s arrival via “Redwood’s Quake Page”, a popular Quake community site. When the community heard, they came to Texas from all over the United States and even attracted a few dedicated gamers from Canada.

The event reached up to 60 people by Friday, a much more crowded and competitive con than anyone was expecting. It grew from there. The room was filled with shouts and curses back and forth and players killed and died on screen. It was filled with community. The id guys arrived, played, entertained and supported the gamers in front of them. Id brought gear for prizes and, when the electricity charge was much higher than anyone expected, John Carmack wrote the group a check to cover the difference.

John Carmack's famous red ride parked outside of QuakeCon '96

Meanwhile, players took to online leagues immediately as the competitive community burned brighter and brighter with each day.

In a 2005 interview with GotFrag.com, Sujoy Roy, an early professional Quake player, said, “Today [in 2005] online and tournament gaming is very organised and it's hard to get a shot at the top players. Back in 1996 it was more like the Wild West. Every player with some kind of reputation was out to protect it the hard way, by spending time on servers and getting their name to the top of the scoreboard.”

“The internet gaming aspect [of Quake] was almost an accident,” said John Carmack in a 2011 note on BethBlog.com. “I had moved from Doom’s peer-to-peer networking to client/server primarily to allow late game entry, and UDP was supported because I was still doing a lot of the development on NEXTSEP unix workstations. The idea of playing over the internet was always there, but I didn’t think it would be practical for many people due to the long latencies and variable performance of typical connections. When it turned out that people were doing it despite the low quality, it gave me the incentive to develop the alternative QuakeWorld executable with the various latency reduction mechanisms.”

QuakeWorld was id Software’s own mod dedicated to improving competitive play. Whereas multiplayer Quake was designed with low latency environments in mind (LANs), QuakeWorld was optimized for internet play with superior netcoding and a world-wide ranking system fueling the competitive fervor. It was an important step forward in a community where the vast majority of competition was taking place online.

More and more leagues started up, most notably and successfully at the time, ClanRing. Founded by a group of energetic but inexperienced amateurs, ClanRing grew from the chaotic scene into one of the most important institutions in competitive gaming of that time. ClanRing was the center of the online Quake world for a time.

“We were all getting our feet wet for the first time,” said Will Bryan of ClanRing to MuppetClan.com, “and we knew there would be a few problems here and there as we learned to swim.”

The occasionally disorganized organization grew and learned from early missteps. Missed matches, latency issues, punctuality, server existence and then stability were hallmark problems of 90s competitive gaming. There was no easy button to compete, no automated matchmakers. These players put in work to compete.

In an era when players’ internet connections varied from T1 to 28.8k modems (a range of 1.5mb/s to 28.8kb/s), it was impossible to ignore the consequential issues.

“Connections are the cruel nemesis of our Quaking existence,” said the player Rigormortis of the successful Impulse 9 team in an interview on MuppetClan.com. Rigormortis went on to describe major ClanRing tournaments in 1997 where his team’s latency regularly varied from 80ms to 7,000ms ping, a wildly unstable range.

Nevertheless, a vibrant community was emerging as the technology struggled to keep up with the demand to compete.Ignored girlfriends, “Quake-widows”, were half-joked about at minor and major events alike. The word ‘sport’ was used effusively to describe the competitive nature of the game as well as a hopeful future. Excited fans sincerely, loudly wondered how long it would take for the Olympics to notice them.

QuakeNet, now the largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server around, was founded in 1997, providing a focal point for a growing community in need of cohesion.

The 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) featured the zenith of Thresh’s competitive gaming star. The event’s Red Annihilation tournament would land him a prize to be remembered. John Carmack’s red Ferrari 328 GTS was parked smack in the middle of the tournament floor waiting for a winner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAmNtOfpR8Q

From thousands of online competitors, 16 had made the cut to play at E3 including some of the biggest names in Quake. WhiteWolf, Cross, Pookie, Reptile, Unholy, Sho2, B2, Kenn, Tony Nusall, Gollum, Kiljoy, rom1, froggy and Ultra.p all showed up to play but eventually fell short. The finalists were Tom Kizmey (Entropy) and Dennis Fong (Thresh). Thresh dominated Entropy in the finals by a score of 13-1, claiming the royal red car and the lasting fame that came with it. Additionally, GotFrag.com reports that Thresh won a $10,000 Haunted House Doom tournament at that same event, adding further to his bank account and his legend.

Angel Munoz, the founder of the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), later stated on GotFrag.com, “When John Carmack announced he was giving away his Ferrari as a prize for the winner of Red Annihilation, the concept for CPL was born.”

ClanRing, the premiere competitive Quake community that had organized Red Annihilation, primarily played host to major team games (4v4). The American Thresh’s Death Row team (with B2, Unholy and Spear) won the year’s major tournament in California over another top American team, Unforgiven (consisting of Gollum, Batch, Thorn and Graphik).

QuakeCon grew in 1997 as well, offering an organized tournament for the first time. ‘RiX’ won the tournament and took home $3,000 in hardware. It would still be two years until id Software became directly involved and the event began to resemble the behemoth that QuakeCon is today but an estimated 650 attendees were proof positive that the convention was moving forward.

By the mid-1990s, the competitive gaming community had firmly established itself online.

Doom and Quake are two of the most important esports titles of all time, both contributing invaluable firsts to a growing scene and community as well as catalyzing competitive gaming forward toward uncharted territory, directly in front of the mainstream spotlight. The world was taking notice.

“Quake may be the most influential game of all time,” wrote Ryan Winterhalter at 1up.com. “Not the best game, not the most innovative, but the most influential. Without it, the industry would be a very different place today. “It gave rise to many of aspects of modern gaming that we take for granted. Its developers, modders, and even the very code of the game itself are ubiquitous in the industry today. Id Software's 1996 FPS gave rise to 3D gaming, client/server online play, the most prolific mod scene in history, multiplayer clans, server browsers, esports, mouse-look as the PC control standard, Valve and dozens of other companies, and even 1UP's sister website, GameSpy. Without Quake, it's unlikely another game that featured the same suite of innovations would have come along. We would have had to wait for each of those things one at a time.”

Soon, with a wildly different sort of video game, computer chair generals around the world would play and compete in the real time strategy (RTS) genre, destined to fill arenas around the world in a way that no other genre has ever matched.

+Warcraft and the 90s RTS boom (1994)

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty was the presciently titled 1992 game for DOS that set a number of important standards for the RTS genre. However, one fateful omission would cut the game’s lifespan short. The game lacked a multiplayer option, a mode of play that would soon become the raison d'etre for some of the greatest RTS games of all time.

By 1994, the next great game in the genre had come along. It was brighter, faster and gave gamers the ever-important option to face off against human opponents from around the world in full-scale war.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was Blizzard Entertainment’s first entry into the genre. It took the now-classic RTS foundation that Dune 2 had built and dragged it toward the future. The increased speed was the greatest gameplay departure in a title which otherwise borrowed heavily from its predecessor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Uq92eCdNQM

Following Warcraft, 1995’s Command & Conquer was the next milestone RTS title to hit the market. Westwood Studios, the creators of Dune 2, built a new game and set aside many of the key points pioneered by Dune 2. The now genre-standard user interface of Dune 2 was altered, user control of the army and important game design choices were changed. The simultaneously confusing and fascinating mechanic of profound army asymmetry (i.e. different factions possessing different weapons and units with which to fight) was brought to new heights. This brought the game new depth.Brett Sperry, a game designer and the man who coined the term RTS, described C&C to Gamespot.com as a clean start on the idea of real time strategy.

"Command & Conquer was the net result of the Dune 2 wish list," said Sperry. "It was time to build the ultimate RTS."

By 1995, online gaming was already a substantial and growing phenomenon. Doom and Doom 2 were at the forefront of the movement, serving as the backbone of the young online competitive gaming community.

In much the same way that an energetic group of fans organized leagues, news sites and teams for the FPS genre, Command & Conquer was the game in which the RTS genre began to permanently establish a serious community on the internet. Gaming networks such as Kali provided an unmatched competitive environment, an exciting setting where players could grab games at any time, contend with opponents the world over and track their stats through it all. Competitions began in earnest with C&C and a new community was born.

Kali was released in 1995, a successor to a program called iDOOM which Kali co-creator Scott Coleman had written in order to play Doom over the internet. Within a short period, Kali became one of the more important institutions in online RTS gaming. It would stay that way for several years, eventually developing a community rivalry with the official Blizzard online service dubbed Battle.net.

Case’s Ladder was, for a time, the premiere competitive platform for Warcraft. Although its set-up was exceedingly simple (players reported matches via e-mail), its success was significant. It can be partly credited for Blizzard’s decision to include an integrated ladder system in StarCraft.

In December of 1995, Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness was released. This was, without a doubt, the most important competitive strategy title to date.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDrA0h3_ZE

“It was popular in school,” said Blid, the 28 year old administrator for War2.ru, the largest surviving Warcraft 2 community on the net. “Not only did I have friends who I'd play over modem late at night, but I'd even hear about people I didn't know well but who played the game. And we'd arrange a time for one person to set his game to 'receive call' and the other to dial him up on the modem.”

Having begun just a few years prior, the proliferation of online gaming signaled a new era in esports. This would be an increasingly democratic movement in which anyone with access to the increasingly popular and affordable personal computer (and eventually consoles) could participate.

From a growing number of points on the planet, a person could create or modify a game, compete in a tournament and become a recognized champion, a celebrated competitor in a vigorous niche.

"The biggest difference between Warcraft 1 and 2 was the multiplayer," Blid continued. "Compared to the sequel, not many people played Warcraft [1] multiplayer and it didn't have the same capabilities online. I think with Warcraft 2, a lot of people first started playing with modem-play.”

From the Warcraft 2 competitive community, it is easy to trace a direct line to the communities of StarCraft, Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, three of the most popular and important competitive titles of all time.

Kali, the Windows network emulator, solidified its place as the home of top competitive RTS. Players such as Guillaume Patry (Grrrr...) and Christopher Page (Pillars), gamers who would go on to become trailblazing professional StarCraft players in Korea, earned their competitive start playing Warcraft 2 on Kali. Complete with cliques, characters, creativity, a serious competitive streak and close knit groups of friends that would help build an industry, Kali was home to a genre on the rise.

While Warcraft 1 and Command & Conquer were titles with relatively short-lived competitive lifespans, Warcraft 2 was at or near the top of the genre for almost three years.

As is the mark of the greatest strategy games, Warcraft 2 is a living and breathing entity with countless twisting paths for a player to take.

The most important RTS games of all time are famous for their ability to fight off the affects of age, to defy stagnation and continue to bring to the foreground new tricks, tactics, strategies and moves that will keep a player thinking hard for years. The greatest competitive games of all time allow for and demand players always move forward.

Call it perpetual motion, the continued evolution that provides fans and players with endless possibilities. Like almost no game before it, Warcraft 2 delivered.

+The CPL and Fatal1ty (1997-2004)

Say what you will about the man -- and there is so very much that has been said -- but, undeniably, Angel Munoz is an enormous figure in competitive gaming’s history. A polarizing man for reasons both professional and personal, Munoz is a pioneer in the industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHg-eJ7o-c

A Dallas stockbroker who grew up in Puerto Rico, Munoz walked away from investment banking in 1995 and set about building “the first ever organized and full sponsored video gaming tournament,” wrote Michael Kane in Game Boys.

Munoz founded the Cyberathlete Professional League in January 1997 after bearing witness to 90s LAN parties and tournaments. Munoz decided to pursue what he saw as the vast untapped commercial potential of competitive gaming.The CPL’s first event (dubbed “The FRAG” for Foremost Roundup of Advanced Gamers) attracted 300 people in a small room with a low ceiling and a dirty rug. The event’s location has been unfavorably compared to a parking garage.

Still, The FRAG was deemed a success in the only contexts that mattered. For the players, it was a worthwhile tournament and the beginning of a more serious competitive circuit. For Munoz, it was the beginning of a profitable enterprise. As Michael Kane writes in Game Boys, the CPL began as a “tidy in-the-black business model” - profitable from the start - and grew from there.

1998 saw the CPL take over the year’s QuakeCon event (the event was even dubbed “The CPL Event” according to GotFrag.com). Later that year, The FRAG 2 was held in Dallas. Boasting a $15,000 prize pool and most of the greatest Quake talent in the world (minus Thresh), the event helped to cement the CPL’s position within the newborn competitive gaming industry.

Angel Munoz’s goal for the CPL was to aggressively mainstream competitive gaming. For years, Munoz sought and secured major sponsors with an unrivaled success rate. Munoz won millions of dollars in sponsorships from major companies such as Intel and Nvidia during his tenure at CPL. His ultimate target was television, living rooms across the world and the dedicated eyes of millions of fans.

Few things would help accomplish that goal as effectively as a true gaming superstar.

The dream for many in esports and for Munoz in particular was to build stars bigger than Tomo Ohira. Tomo was a player who was famous in arcades worldwide, even appearing in passing in major gaming magazines. However, he never made a significant splash in the mainstream.

The dream was to build stars bigger than Billy Mitchell, a player whose medium had long since passed him by.The dream was to build stars bigger than Thresh. Thresh was a player whose consistent success in and out of games still inspires fandom to this day. However, he was never set on becoming the Michael Jordan of competitive gaming, an icon determined to push both the game and the business to new heights.

Enter Fatal1ty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i5LLQBn9zs

Jonathan Wendel (Fatal1ty) began his competitive gaming career in 1999 when, after two months of single-minded training, the then 18 year old American famously used the last $500 in his bank account for a trip to Dallas, Texas to play Quake 3: Arena at a CPL tournament dubbed FRAG 3. It is a story that has been told over and over again.

“I told my dad I’m going to this tournament,” said Wendel in 2008’s Frag documentary. “I have $500 in the bank and I’m pushing all in. If I win any significant money, I’m going to keep doing it. If I don’t win any money, hey, I’m done.”

A third place finish at the tournament earned Wendel $4,000 and justification to continue toward a truly professional gaming career. His dad could only smile.

The high finish also garnered an invite to Sweden to compete against 12 of the best Quake 3 players in the world. Wendel’s dominant first place finish in Sweden included an 18-game winning streak and secured a $15,000 payday for the rising star.Fatal1ty’s chief advantage in game was that he was the first player to properly practice. Often overlooked, practice ability is a valuable skill in and of itself no matter the endeavor. Being able to put in consistent and productive practice is something that often separates good from great in any discipline. Fatal1ty’s single minded-training in 1999 and then his subsequent sponsorship allowed him to practice in a way that few other players were able to during the era. He took advantage of the opportunity.

At the time, most Quake players (such as Blue, Makaveli and LakermaN) relied heavily on aim (not Fatal1ty’s strong suit) and intuition. That breed of player could hit thrilling acrobatic shots and arguably possessed more raw talent than Wendel.On the other hand, Wendel built a well-rounded game on a disciplined and efficient practice routine. While other players would enter a match confident that their aim would carry them to victory (especially on maps such as tourney4 which tended to emphasize raw aim), Fatal1ty would play a different, higher game. The American outworked everyone else and, through his deliberately grown skill, he controlled the map, himself and the game better than any of his peers.Fatal1ty’s gaming acumen was matched by his business savvy. Wendel proactively secured major sponsorship deals for himself. As would become increasingly clear over the length of his career, Fatal1ty was intent on building a brand entirely his own.

Two months after his win in Sweden, Wendel returned to Dallas for the 2000 CPL. Once again competing in Quake 3, Wendel won the event and the $40,000 first place prize (from a total pool of $100,000), earning the first of what would become several world championships.

In 2000, Wendel won around $100,000 in Quake 3 prize money alone at tournaments that included CPL and the World Cyber Games Challenge (WCGC), an Olympics-inspired competition that would grow into one of the more important institutions in the esports world as the WCG.

Fatal1ty’s career spanned several games. In 2001, Wendel captured his second CPL world championship in the deathmatch FPS Aliens vs. Predator 2, a game whose notorious imbalance helped cut its lifespan short. A new Ford Focus (painted green and black and covered with AvP insignia) was added to a $40,000 first place prize.

In 2002, Wendel captured yet another world championship at CPL Winter in Dallas. This time, the game was Unreal Tournament 2003, another deathmatch 1v1 FPS focused on competitive multiplayer by design in the style of QuakeWorld and, later, Quake 3: Arena. Wendel won $10,000 for his efforts.

Fatal1ty’s wins and the growing esports circuit captured the attention of the world in and outside of gaming many times. For mainstream media outlets in America such as Forbes, 60 Minutes, The New York Times and Time, this 20-something was leading a life worth talking about. Media stories about Wendel often treated the boy as a novelty, a youngin leading an interesting if foreign lifestyle that, for better or worse, often left the older journalists shaking their heads in amazement. Condescension, ignorance and laziness have littered mainstream journalists’ attempts at covering esports since the dawn of time. Coverage of Fatal1ty was not always terribly different.

In these pieces from the 2000s, Wendel was often referred to as “the most famous gamer in the world” by journalists at the expense of ignored esports industries in Asia and Europe.

As far as mainstream exposure is concerned, the height of Fatal1ty’s visibility can likely be pinpointed to March 13, 2003. This was the day that MTV’s documentary series True Life featured Wendel’s first place Unreal Tournament 2003 run at Winter CPL 2002 as part of an hour long episode focusing on gamers in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3q2zR9j1js

“Overall, the most accomplished player is definitely Fatal1ty,” said esports journalist and tournament organizer Michal Blicharz (Carmac) in 2008. “Gamers like Fatal1ty who are very very successful, especially from a financial point of view, are really very good examples of what you can do if you are very talented and very motivated.”

Fatal1ty’s success was a symptom of a growing esport. That growth benefited those around him. In 2004, Chinese player RocketBoy defeated Wendel in a game of Doom 3 and earned $120,000, a record. RocketBoy won the 2004 Doom 3 CPL championship.

Gamers such as Fatal1ty were a major boon to Munoz’s vision of a video game league mimicking and rivaling the National Football League, far and away America’s most popular and profitable American sports institution.

However, even the luminous star of Fatal1ty couldn’t keep deathmatch games on top of the Western world forever. Soon, a new game would carry the torch forward.

I keep editing my original post, but this is really amazing. Also I'm guessing that the staff will spotlight this when the whole thing is complete, because they'd be crazy not to with all the work involved here. :D

Sorry about the poorly edited video for part 3. Admittedly it was a rush job because of some personal stuff I'm taking care of atm. I'll get a better edit out asap when I get home. Thanks for all the feedback good and bad though, it really helps. Glad you guys are otherwise enjoying it!